Car Detailing in L.A.

My wife sent me a text: “Molly is going to call you with news. Be happy.” The call came, and the news: Our older daughter, Molly Jane, 26, who has lived in Russia since she went to graduate school there four years ago, was engaged to marry her…

I had thought I was the last male Zuckerman in our family. Zuckerman is a fairly common Jewish name (see Pinchas, the Philip Roth character, my orthopedic surgeon), but my own family for the last few generations has produced an abundance of…

Germany wants you to know that it has a house whose energy is supplied by algae growing in its walls. Pakistan wants you to know that its parliament building runs entirely on solar power. Russia, sort of missing the point, is very excited about oil…

IT IS LATE morning in Port-au-Prince, and the Haitian psychiatrist's chauffeur has arrived to drive us up north to meet two zombies. Narcisse visits the tomb where he was buried in 1962. He claims to have spent three days underground. A madiawe, or…

Heading into my golden years, I have one bad knee, two good daughters and 836 names in my iPhone address book. Of the latter, 246 are people I have not seen or spoken to in at least 10 years. Thirty-nine are a total mystery to me — I have no idea who…

Abby Elliott claims that she dropped out of college because mice were urinating on her eyeballs. After graduating from high school in Danbury, Conn., in 2005, she enrolled at a college in New York City, where she was so unhappy to find mice in her…

I regret to inform you that Katie Price plans to put her removed breast implants up for auction on eBay with a minimum bid of one million pounds; that her reality show is a continuing success on British television; that her three autobiographies, all…

Never mind that they were in the middle of a desert. The grains of sand all around them, microscopically speaking, were too round. Perfect sand traps require angular sand (so that golf balls don't stick in trap walls but roll to the bottom); angular…

Never mind that they were in the middle of a desert. The grains of sand all around them, microscopically speaking, were too round. Perfect sand traps require angular sand (so that golf balls don’t stick in trap walls but roll to the bottom); angular…

After completing his 67-day, 3,278-mile swim down the Amazon River on April 8, Martin Strel, a 53-year-old Slovene, did not make the same mistake he made after finishing his 2,360-mile swim down the Mississippi in 2002 — this time, instead of going…

When they weren't slithering through bat guano or leaping off waterfalls, competitors in the first Elf Authentic Adventure -- a 360-mile race for ''genuine adventurers'' across and between the Philippine islands of Samar and Leyte -- were supposed to…

In Los Angeles, car washing gets beneath the surface. Shortly after moving from New York to Los Angeles, I went to get my car washed. The price was $7.50, which seemed a little stepp until I realized this car wash was different from the car washes

WHEN HE TURNED 30 IN 1978, BILL GIBSON cheerfully recalls, “I had kind of zero career potential.” A transplanted American in Vancouver, B.C., he was taking university courses—largely because they made him eligible for Canadian government education…

Bill Gates doesn’t like to waste time. He has posted a map of Africa on the wall of his garage so his eyes can sweep over it while he’s getting in and out of the car. “Your mind has a lot of bandwidth that’s very unused when your eyes are wandering…